Category Archives: girl

In an effort to induce more girls to consider careers in science, the European Commission (EC) produced a slick minute long video that turned out to be so sexist that it caused an uproar. The vid reeks of stiletto high heels and mini skirts and has been thoroughly panned by virtually everyone who sees it.

The EC promptly pulled the video, but defended itself saying that the video tried to “speak their language to get their attention,” referring to young girls. The intent was to produce a video that is “fun, catchy” and would strike a chord with young girls.

The vid, which is entitled “Science: It’s A Girl Thing!,” makes many women who are already employed in the sciences feel insulted by the video’s “sexist” tone and do not think it is “fun” or “catchy” in any way.

In NewStatesman Martha Gill wrote “This kind of campaign insults women who are interested in science already and can more than hold their own with the boys.”

Although the video is already off the market, the EC promises more vids in a similar vein. “We want to overturn clichés and show women and girls, and boys too, that science is not about old men in white coats,” said Geoghegan-Quinn, European Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner speaking at the European Parliament in Brussels.

She said that the “Science, it’s a girl thing!” video is a teaser for a campaign to get more girls into science, and that the campaign will cover 27 EU member states over the next three years.

Quinn further said, “We’re trying to overcome stereotypes. Yet we’re targeting a whole gender – women in general. We need to find a way to appeal to the whole of womenkind. Yet we don’t want to use stereotypes. Yet we need to appeal to a whole gender. Yet we don’t want to use stereotypes.”

Assuming that is true, it is difficult to understand why the EC came up with this video, because everything in it is stereotypical.

In the city of Xi’an, in northern China, a teenage girl was caught on camera falling into a sinkhole apparently because she was too busy talking on her cellphone and failed to pay attention to where she was walking.

The teen tumbled 20 feet to the bottom of the hole. Wang Wei, a Good Samaritan cab driver, witnessed the incident and, in an attempt to rescue the girl, climbed down into the hole to find her. Initially she was unresponsive, but after Wei shook her a bit she came to. The fire department finally was called in to rescue the duo.

Although the sinkhole was marked with warning cones, the small markers might easily be missed by passing pedestrians in a hurry.

The moral to this story is: Don’t depend upon the government to warn you of the sinkholes in life.

A young girl at the mall walks about oblivious to everything as she is texting that very important message, probably to her BFF. Unknown to her a water filled fountain lurks ahead, and, yes you are so right, she plops straight into the drink.

This vid is so very funny. You cannot miss it:

The good news for our young friend is that once she is old enough to drive, she will be texting in her car instead of at the mall. At least then she will not get wet when she texts; she will merely kill and maim others by ramming her car into them. (Only wish I was kidding)

Clearly the security guards at the mall have some of the best jobs out there when they get to watch some of us do some of the dumbest things.

While hiking along the trail to his deer hunting shack on his 100 acre property in Shell Lake in northwestern Wisconsin, Dale Parks came upon a deflated pink balloon with a white note attached.

“It was just a note rolled up and I happened to see white and a little bit of ribbon,” Parks recalled.

Somehow, among the dense 100 acres of Parks’ property, a letter postmarked for heaven alit at his feet. If it had drifted three or more feet to either side of the trail, Parks would never have spied it. Its date was August 28, 2010, and it read:

“It’s like a needle in a haystack,” said Parks. “What happened to this little girl that she was dead at 7 years old?”

Who was Mia? How did Annie, her beloved friend, die?

Parks took the letter to his deer hunting group, Whitetails Unlimited, where he showed it to his friends including Bill Thornley, who is also editor of the local newspaper, the Spooner Advocate.

Thornley took it upon himself to research area schools and obituaries, but found no trace of either Mia or Annie. So Thornley printed her letter under the headline, “Her name was Annie, and she was loved.”

“I really hope you had a great 7 years of your life.”

The response to Mia’s letter was overwhelming, with calls and emails flooding Thornley’s office . None of them, however, knew who the two girls were.

Six weeks after the Spooner Advocate published Mia’s letter, Thornley finally received an email from Annie’s grandmother, Renee Bahneman, solving the mystery. The email read:

“I am Annie Bahneman’s grandmother. Annie died Aug. 21, 2010 and was buried on Aug. 27th. Mia was a friend of Annie’s from our lake cabin at Lake Koronis, in Paynesville, MN. I think Mia wrote this letter and let if fly from Edina, Minn. on Aug. 28th! Annie died very suddenly from Primary Amoebic Meningoenchephalitis. Primary Amoebic Meningoenchephalitis is an extremely rare brain infection.

Annie Bahneman was a sweet strawberry blonde from Stillwater. Her family says the illness took her life four days after her first symptoms. She died with a pink sunset outside her hospital window.”

Annie’s parents are Chad and Bridget Bahneman of Stillwater, Minnesota. They told Annie’s story on their Caring Bridge web site:

“Since Annie’s death, we have learned that she experienced an extremely rare form of meningitis called amoebic meningitis. She had the 1st known case of amoebic meningitis in Minnesota. Annie loved to swim and the beautifully warm summer we have experienced in Minnesota this year lended to many swimming opportunities. As is typical with adventurous 7 year olds, she was constantly trying to master new skills. One of these skills was learning how to do handstands in the water. She would come up grinning, laughing, and asking about the quality of her work. The suspicion is that during one of these playful moments that she got exposed to amoeba in the water.

We said goodbye to Annie with a beautiful celebration of her life on Friday, August 27th. The visitation, funeral, and luncheon were held at the Church of St. Michael in Stillwater. We then were joined by family and friends in a walking parade from Saint Michael’s to Fairview Cemetery in Stillwater. At the end we released balloons in honor of Annie.”

Mia is Mia Schultz and a third grader from Edina, Minnesota. She released her letter to Annie attached to a pink balloon the day after Annie’s funeral because she was not able to attend the funeral herself to say goodby to her friend, Annie.

“I didn’t go to her funeral, so I felt really bad inside,” said Mia. “The last day I saw her was on her birthday, I wish she was still alive now.”

“It took me about a half an hour, because I put all my love in it.”

Mia still remembers the first day she met Annie, outside their family lake cabin. The two were inseparable from that moment on.

The day after the funeral Mia took up her pencil to say her own goodbye to her friend Annie.

“It took me about a half an hour, because I put all my love in it,” explained Mia. “When I had a hard time spelling the words, I would just ask my mom.”

The Schultz family attached Mia’s letter postmarked for heaven to a pink balloon, and from their front yard in Edina, Minnesota, they watched as it sailed over the tree tops and beyond.

“I hope everything in Heaven is good.”

“It went all the way up there, and it took it like five minutes, and then it was gone,” remembered Mia.

“I want her to know it was fun having her, that I loved her. I thought since God was hearing it and saw it, I thought it was going to last,” Mia said.

The wind carried Mia’s letter 115 miles from her Edina home to Parks’ out-of-the-way, wooded trail in Shell Lake, Wisconsin.

Watch Annie and Mia’s story in the following video:

The editor Thornley summed it up, “It grabs your heart. This little girl sent a message to her friend and the wind blew it to somebody who could find it and tell her story.”

The girl in the red hoodie who shocked and angered the entire planet by throwing six puppies only days old into a river to drown has been tentatively identified as Katja Puschnik from the town of Bugojno, Bosnia. However, her identity has not been absolutely confirmed.

Members of the web site 4chan.org managed to track her by tracking down the owner of the YouTube account that originally uploaded the now infamous video to YouTube. If you have not seen the video watch it here.

A second video was uploaded to YouTube, purportedly by Ms. Puschnik, apologizing for the incident. However YouTube quickly removed the video. Below is a photo from the video taken before its removal from YouTube:

It is unknown if the apology is real or merely a hoax.

Both PETA and Rescue Ink have separately each offered $2,000 rewards for information to the perpetrator’s capture. Film director Michael Bay, who directed Transformers, has reportedly offered a $50,000 reward.

Some web sites are reporting that the camera man was the girl’s brother, who also reportedly uploaded the video to YouTube.

A puppy throwing monster of a girl is caught on video in the act of drowning a bucketful of puppies that appear to be only days old. One by one this young unknown girl tosses the puppies into a rushing river with a current that is clearly too fast for the puppies to survive.

That appears to be the point of the exercise for the girl obviously intends to drown the puppies.

A few of the puppies yelp as she picks them out of the bucket because she is not too gentle while picking them up. The tiny little pups are not much bigger than the girl’s hand.

The girl even callously says “whee” as she tosses one pup to its death. She appears not to care one ounce for the lives of the young doggies she is killing because her body language is quite normal while she tosses the cute little devils.

You can be sure you will hear more about this incident, and it is unlikely that the identity of the girl and her accomplice camera handler will remain unknown for long.

The girl in the red hoodie who shocked and angered the entire planet by throwing six puppies only days old into a river to drown has been tentatively identified as Katja Puschnik from the town of Bugojno, Bosnia.

Pardon the pun but this one’s a bit of a shocker! Believe it or not but an Ozark, Arkansas, police officer tasered a 10-year-old girl because she would not take a shower.

It’s a story making news worldwide. Officer Dustin Bradshaw was called to the home by the girl’s mother because of a domestic disturbance. Upon arrival Bradshaw found the girl curled up on the floor, screaming. In his police report Bradshaw stated that the girl screamed, kicked and resisted when her mother tried to get her into the shower before bed.

“Her mother told me to tase her if I needed to,” Bradshaw continued.

Bradshaw tried to take the 10-year-old into custody, however, the girl’s behavior quickly changed and she soon was “violently kicking and verbally combative.” He further stated that the girl kicked him in the groin.

That was when he tased her. Bradshaw said in his report that he delivered “a very brief drive stun to her back.”

Ozark Mayor Vernon McDaniel said that the girl was not injured, and she is now residing at the Western Arkansas Youth Shelter in Cecil, Arkansas.

However, McDanial isn’t sure if Officer Bradshaw acted appropriately. McDaniel asked the Arkansas State Police to investigate the incident, but they have declined to do so. Now McDaniel has asked the FBI to do so.

“People here feel like that he made a mistake in using a Taser, and maybe he did, but we will not know until we get an impartial investigation,” said McDaniel.

Ozark Police Chief Jim Noggle, who said that Bradshaw is not facing disciplinary action, also claimed that Tasers are safe.

“We didn’t use the Taser to punish the child — just to bring the child under control so she wouldn’t hurt herself or somebody else,” said Noggle.

Noggle said the officer might have accidentally broken the child’s arm or leg if he had forcibly tried to handcuff her. Chief Noggle actually managed to say that with a straight face.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has reported that the girl’s father, Anthony Medlock, said the girl has emotional problems but she was not armed and should not have been tasered.

“My daughter does not deserve to be tased and be treated like an animal,” said Medlock. He and the girl’s mother are divorced and the mother has sole custody.

While traveling the Net, I ran into a very funny guy by the name of Larry Graves over at ning.com. Larry is a clever fellow who likes to bill himself as the Canadian Studmuffin.

I readily admit that I did not research the studmuffin component of Larry’s character and, frankly, I sense no burning desire to do so. For those of you who are so inclined, head on over to Larry Graves and knock yourself out.

What I did explore though is Larry’s humor, and I learned that he is a very clever guy who is capable of doing strange things with fish tanks. I thought I would present a portion of Larry’s wit, which oftentimes manifests a Redneck bite to it. In fact, our first vid is Larry’s creation and is called Weird Fish.

Have a Look at Weird Fish by Larry Graves:

Well, that is truly one ugly fish. There is no doubt about that.

________________________________________

Our second vid is also a product of the imagination of Larry Graves, who, in this video, abandoned his fish tank for a sojourn into the real world. The video is entitled Sexy Girl, and the female lead is played by Taylor Amelia, an actress who has absolutely no difficulty convincing anyone that she is, indeed, a sexy girl, a very sexy girl in fact.

Please give a look at Sexy Girl:

I don’t believe that Phil made a decision there that most other men would agree with.

We have some remarkable sporting feats and bloopers in both photos and videos today. Naturally some are obviously staged, but even the staged ones are exceptional. Now, most of these folks cannot be labeled as rednecks, but a handful can. See if you can guess which ones are the rednecks.

Imagine a human billboard with the participants playing either football or soccer, depending on what part of the world you live in. The location is somewhere in East Asia (who can tell Japanese writing from Chinese? Not I).

It’s not a new idea. Microsoft had a similar billboard for the opening of Microsoft Vista, and we even found a similar billboard in a movie musical from 1929. But believe that you need remarkable athletic ability to play soccer with your body parallel to the ground high above the streets below.

This type of stunt provides a mountain of publicity, as you can see from the crowds in the streets beneath the billboard. But this one qualifies as a “Don’t do this at home.” If you try it at home, we never heard of you.

No, no, no! You’re supposed to hit the ball with the bat, not with your face. Well, at least that is a good start to our bloopers, although that had to hurt. But the best bloopers are on video, so let’s take a look.

*****

Our videos are all short, so try not to worry about your time commitment. The first one is a terrific example of an incredibly talented girl baseball player. Even Tori Hunter could not make this catch any better.

Hopefully, you caught on that the video is fake and is for an upcoming commercial. But real or fake, it was fun anyway.

The next video shows you a side of fatherhood that none of us aspire toward.

Oooh! Litle girl! If you only knew what you just did. I can really feel for that poor guy. You women will never know how incredibly painful that is.

Video No. 3 shows how juvenile delinquency can go so very wrong and never turns out the way you planned.

That kid was ever so lucky because he could have been burned so much worse. I remember doing some dumb things as a kid, but I was never that dumb.

Our final video proves that, despite the best of intentions, accidents do happen.

Now that is one understanding mother. How she ever learned to be that good natured is beyond belief.

Victoria Lindsay is the 16-year-old cheerleader from Lakeland, Florida, who was gang beaten by six other teen age girls from her school so they could post a video of the beating on YouTube and MySpace. Lindsay’s 911 call to the police after the attack was released by the Polk County Sheriff and is included below.

Here are the mug shots of the alleged perpetrators:

Police have said that the “animalistic” ambush on Victoria lasted 30 minutes during which Victoria’s head was brutally beaten into a wall until she fell unconscious. See the actual video of the beating.

Victoria told People magazine in her first interview after the beating that she was in “a lot of pain” after the attack.

Victoria is also quoted as telling People, “Your No. 1 friend is your family. Don’t trust anybody,” and if “you put it on the Internet, it will live in infamy.”

Obviously Victoria feels betrayed by girls that she thought were her friends including Mercades Nichols, whom she was living with until the day of the attack. Mercades was allegedly one of the attackers.

At her tender age, Mercades already has a violent legal record. Last fall her boyfriend at the time filed a dating violence injunction against her.

Blogger and YouTube videos have sometimes been slow to start lately even on a high speed connection. Sometimes you must click the start button twice. Please be patient; the video will begin eventually.

YouTube removed this video from its site because some wuss flagged it as inappropriate. YouTube has been removing any of my videos that are the least controversial. The folks at YouTube seem to confuse “Community Standards” with censorship, thinking one automatically follows the other. I now have it set up elsewhere, so watch knowing that YouTube thinks you are not capable of making your own decision about what you should be able to watch.

Here is the much sought after video of six Florida teen age girls gang beating another 16-year-old girl and video taping the incident just so they could post the video of the beating on YouTube and MySpace.

The victim is Victoria Lindsay, a Lakeland, Florida, high school student and cheerleader, who suffered a concussion during the beating, along with hearing and vision loss. Lakeland is near the Tampa metropolitan area.

The six alleged perpetrators are from age 14 to 17 and all attend Mulberry High School together. The six, along with two 18-year-old boys who stood as lookouts during the attack, will be tried as adults.

All are being charged with felony battery and felony false imprisonment. Brittni Hardcastle, Brittany Mayes and Mercades Nichols, all 17, also are charged with felony kidnapping and felony witness tampering because the three girls allegedly drove Lindsay around after the attack and threatened to beat her even more if she reported the beating to the police.

Eventually, they dropped her off at an intersection near another teen’s home.

Prior to the video shown here, the six girls allegedly beat Lindsay to the point that she lost consciousness. Once she awoke, the alleged attackers began the video taping and continued the beating.

Patrick Lindsay, Victoria Lindsay’s father, said during a news conference, “When I saw my daughter in the emergency room, I didn’t even recognize my own daughter.”

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said, “They lured her into the home for the express purpose of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet. This is outrageous behavior.”

It is being reported by the media that the motivation for the attack was retaliation for things Lindsay posted about the other girls on her MySpace page. However, the page had virtually nothing posted on it on 4/13/2008.

The attack and the video taping of the attack is taking cyber bullying to a new level.

The battery and false imprisonment charges could result in a 10 year sentence, while the kidnapping charge could add another 15 years in prison.